Collecting Judgments

After you get ripped off and sue someone, that is only
half the battle.
Judgments do not collect themselves, and the courts
will not help you
collect your judgment. Usually, a judgment is just a
piece of paper with
an imaginary value. If you used an attorney to win your
judgment, often
collecting judgments is not their specialty. If you
hired an attorney to
win your lawsuit, you might owe them a lot of money to
get that fancy
piece of paper. With few exceptions, it costs lots of
money and time to
collect a judgment.

The person or entity owing the money is the judgment
debtor, the one owed
the money is the judgment creditor. The laws related to
judgment
collection vary in each state. Judgments usually earn
interest, usually
two to twelve percent per year, and last for a limited
number of years,
usually five to twenty years.

Most people do not understand how hard it is to collect
most judgments.
More than 90 percent of them are never collected.
Judgments do not sell
for much cash upfront, the average sale price is about
1-7%. Anyone that
brags that they pay 50% cash upfront for judgments, or
guarantees a quick
judgment collection in full, is lying.

This article is my opinion, and not legal advice. I am
a judgment broker, and am not a lawyer.
If you ever need any legal
advice or a
strategy to use, please contact a lawyer. If you are
considering suing
someone, it makes sense first to hire a private
investigator to determine
if they have any assets, and (especially when suing a
company) take care
to properly identify who should be sued.

The methods of collecting judgments are not guaranteed,
and bankruptcy can
kill most judgments. One method used in judgment
collection is to record
liens on the judgment debtor's property. Another method
is getting a writ
of execution from the court and pay a Sheriff or
Marshall seize a judgment
debtor's property to sell at an auction. Another method
is to have the
Sheriff seize the judgment debtor's funds from their
bank account, or
intercept some of their wages or other income streams.

Judgment collection usually takes a long time, even
longer now because of
budget cutbacks at courts and Sheriff's offices. Some
other problems with
judgment collection are judgment debtors often try to
hide their assets,
the laws offer them exemptions, it is expensive to
attempt to undo
Fraudulent Transfers (and FT time limits are very
short), everything must
be done through the courts and Sheriff, and the
judgment
collection-related forms are complicated.

To attempt to collect money from your judgment, you can
try to collect it
yourself, hire a lawyer, try to sell it for cash
upfront (at a very steep
discount), or find a future-payment contingency
collection solution. The
word contingency is starting to get avoided by
non-lawyer collection
experts. However, future-payment and contingency
collection usually mean
the same thing; usually you pay nothing out of pocket,
and get an average
of half of whatever might get collected.